


call to war

by straddling_the_atmosphere



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Betrayal, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-28
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-05-28 12:37:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19394293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/straddling_the_atmosphere/pseuds/straddling_the_atmosphere
Summary: It starts with a letter.When Madi's mother receives a letter from Woodes Rogers telling her that Madi is alive, she tells Flint to rescue her--without telling John Silver. After freeing her from Woodes Rogers, Madi convinces Flint to pretend she is still dead. The consequences of this change everything--and nothing at all.





	1. the letter

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to @gassada for the INCREDIBLE art, go check it out on tumblr!

It starts with a letter. 

Well, first, it begins with a war. It starts with Captain Flint seeing a house filled with Miranda’s things go up in flames. It starts with Eleanor Guthrie dying in his arms. 

It starts with Captain Flint looking at Long John Silver and watching the way his face crumples in on itself, the way he mouthed the word _no,_ over and over again. It starts with Long John Silver snarling at Julius in a rough, thick voice, for him to _leave_ if he doesn’t want to fight this war.

It starts with the Maroon Island and the crowd of pirates and other escaped slaves, the Maroon Queen’s face when she sees that her daughter is not with them.

It starts with, _Look at me, I will get you through this, as you did with me._

But, really, it starts with a letter.

“I’m sorry, you want me to what?” Flint asks, brow furrowing.

“I want you to save my daughter.”

“Yes, I understood that much,” he says. He wants to save Madi, too. She had become his friend, after they had both thought they’d lost Silver. “But you don’t want me to tell my quartermaster.”

“No,” she says. “I don’t.” Her face is set and her jaw hard. 

“He should know,” Flint says. “Your daughter and he--”

“I _know_ what my daughter and he do, Captain Flint,” she snaps, then takes a slow breath. “That is why I don’t want him to know.”

 _\--_ ("I loved her," he’d said, "And I believe she loved me. I think she would’ve wanted you to know that, too."

The Queen had been quiet after Silver’s words, tapping her fingers on the arm of her chair.

"It is very bold of you, I think, to assume that she wanted me to know something I had already realized." She’d met his eyes then and Silver had swallowed, watching her. "You are not subtle." It’s a reproach. "She is, but I taught her everything she knows." Her lips had thinned, taking in his haggard face, drawn lines around his eyes.

She remembers Madi at sixteen, pouring over a book her father had sent her, tracing curious fingers over a drawing of a white man, a hero. She had asked so many questions, never having seen one before that she remembered well. It does not surprise her that her daughter was drawn to one, even if it disappoints her.

"I--" He had opened his mouth for a moment, floundering, and then closed it.

The Queen shakes her head. She can’t say much about her daughter’s choice in men. "My daughter died protecting us. Protecting our people in this war. She died doing what was right." Her voice was cool, flinty. "She did not die for you, or for the Captain, or for me. She died for this." She had gestured, to the island, to the people living on it. She looked at Silver again. "Our people grow up learning to die for this. There is no room in our lives for selfishness. So, yes, you could say she died for something she believed in. But don’t think for one moment it is the same thing you and your Captain fight for."

"Are we not fighting the same war?" Silver had asked quietly.

The Queen gave him a look. "We are allies, yes. But don’t forget how we found you." She stood up, straightening her shawl. She looked regal, like Madi always had, the natural grace of who she was exuded from her entire body. "Your ship sold more than you saved. And I will never forget that."

She began to leave and then paused right beside Silver. She felt her face soften. "She did love you , she says, not looking at him. And I can see you loved her. That does mean something to me. But you were not married under my eyes, so you were not her husband. Not where it matters."

Then she had left with a swish of her skirts, leaving Silver there to contemplate the empty chair she’d left behind.)

\--Flint frowns.

“He will sacrifice too much for her,” she says, meeting his eyes. “Neither she nor I would want that. You will rescue her, discreetly.”

“He’ll wonder where I’m gone,” Flint says after a moment. “We don’t usually go anywhere without the other anymore, not for things like this.”

“He will not be able to go,” she says briskly. “His leg, it is infected again. You haven’t noticed?”

He had, in truth. Silver had been taking to sitting for more and more meetings, avoiding putting pressure on his hip. He had no iron leg anymore, thank God, but the day he’d spent with Hands had not been kind to him, and neither had the battle after. 

Flint sighs. “I’ll tell him I’m on a scouting trip then, shall I?”

The Maroon Queen nods. “Do so.”

* * *

“Let’s take you back,” Flint says and Madi reaches out to grip his shirt. 

( _How did you find me?_ She had asked and Flint had mentioned the letter and her mother, the sloop and the small crew of people he’d taken with him for this journey to Nassau, to rescue her. 

_And John?_

_He doesn’t know,_ he’d said, and Madi had nodded, lips pursed.)

“How is he?” she asks.

Flint sees Silver’s distraught face in his mind, hair ragged from where he’s gripped it, eyes bright and luminous blue and wet.

“Distraught,” he says. “Wrecked.”

Madi takes that like a blow, eyes closing. “Is he angry?” she asks. “Does he rage over me?”

Flint nods slowly. “He would tear the world apart if he thought it would please your dying wishes.” 

She opens her eyes again, looking at him intently. “Then you see why I can’t go back.”

Flint’s brow furrows. “Madi–”

“He is _committed_ to the cause now. A man like John Silver–he didn’t want a war. Not until he had personal stake in the game. You know this, Captain. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen it.”

“You are asking me to lie to him,” Flint says, voice low.

“Yes,” Madi says plainly. “As you have many times before.”

Flint’s eyes flash. “Not about something like _this_ ,” he says. “You didn’t see him–he was–”

“Ruined over me,” Madi says softly. “And now he will fight with you, no matter the end. We both need this war, Captain. And we need him as part of it. This is the only way.”

Flint swallows, looking away from her. She studies the fine tremble of his cheek, the dulled silver of his earring. His mouth curves down, a gentle movement, and she sees, abruptly, what John must see in this man. Loyalty and fierce, desperate anger, come together in a beautiful body honed like a weapon. 

“What will you do?” he asks finally. 

“I will rule,” she says. “From the shadows, as my father once did with us.” She pulls off a brown bracelet, beads clinking together, and presses it into Flint’s hand. “You will give that to my mother and she will know that I live. Tell her she must not say a word.”

“How will we communicate?” Flint asks, resigned. 

“Will you be on Nassau often?”

Flint shakes his head. “There were so many people on the island,” he says. “Pirates, Julius’s people, more escaped slaves. I have to train some of them in the time we have.” 

“Rogers knows about the island.”

Flint nods. “We had the moment of surprise last time,” he says. “No more.”

“He won’t have me anymore to bargain with,” Madi replies.

“He won’t.” Flint smiles a little. “I’m sure you’ll be a thorn in his side.”

Madi smiles back at him for a brief moment and then sighs. “There is no easy way for us to communicate. When you are next on the island, I will send Kofi to you.”

Flint nods after a moment, but his brow furrows in thought. “He will never forgive us when he finds out,” he says.

“ _I_ _f_ he finds out,” she says. “We may die anyway, Captain.”

Flint snorts. “Cheery.”

Madi manages a small smile, looking at him with those serious dark eyes of hers. “You will need to move the cache. Rogers knows of the island now, and it isn’t so big that he couldn’t wipe out my people to find it.”

Flint makes a sound of agreement. “We’ll be back here,” he says. “To release some of the men to raise hell.”

“I will try to send a message then.” She pauses. “Take care of him,” she says softly. Something thick lodges itself in Flint’s throat.

“I’ll try.”

They part with the heavy weight of her beaded bracelet in his pocket, and a kiss on his forehead that he feels long after.

* * *

When he arrives back on the island, he’s happy to see Silver up and about, no longer flushed and hectic from fever and disorientation. He still looks vacant, the kind of grief he’d seen in his own eyes when Thomas had been taken from him, when he’d raged and done not much else. There are countless of other people on the island, other pirates ready to join them, and Silver easily talks to them, the perfect figurehead, but he isn’t really all there. It isn’t until later, when he stumbles into Silver in his cabin, hidden away from the drinking and the crowds, that he sees what he’s feeling.

Silver is a shaking thing, torn apart by grief and ferocious anger. Something about him seems delicate now--hair an unruly mess around his shoulders, the curve of his collarbone and hollow of his throat breakable, liable to shatter at the wrong touch applied just a bit too hard. 

“I thought,” Silver had said to Flint, hands in his hair, gripping. “I thought that you’d find her.” 

_So he had noticed I was gone,_ Flint thinks, absently, watching him.

“I had this _hope_ …”

Flint feels the beads in his pocket like a brand, wouldn’t be surprised if, when he tugged his jacket off, he’d see a smoking hole in his shirt where the pocket of his jacket touches. 

Silver turns to look at him blindly. “How did you do it?” he rasps, and Flint can see his hands shaking. Flint’s lips twist.

“You know how I did it,” he says. “You’ve seen me. You know what lies behind my actions.”

“The war for Thomas,” Silver says, laughing bleakly. “I suppose now it’s my war for Madi, isn’t it?”

Flint tries to swallow the thing inside him that wants to tell him, the thing in him that wants to take those shaking hands and kneel between his legs and make Silver _look_ at him. Wants to say, _She’s alive, Silver. She’s alive._

But then he hears Madi’s voice-- _If you do this, all we’ve worked for will be lost._

“I suppose it is,” is what Flint says instead, gentling his voice. “If you want it to be.”

Silver stares at his hands, his breathing slow. Flint watches the rise and fall of Silver’s shoulders, the small curve of his ears peeking out from beneath his hair.

“She can’t have died for nothing,” he says tonelessly, eyes closing. Flint reaches out like he did before, and squeezes his shoulder. Silver leans into it and they stay like that, quiet, for a very long time.

* * *

“Mr. Silver,” Julius says, looking up when Silver’s shadow falls over him. He is peeling a mango, the juice dripping from his fingers. 

“Julius,” he says. “How are you enjoying the island?”

“Idyllic.” He squints as he looks over at some of the Maroon men talking to each other. “Peaceful.”

Silver watches him. “You weren’t keen to join this fight.”

“No,” Julius says, taking a bite of a mango slice. “I want my people to survive.”

“You don’t think we can win,” Silver says and Julius watches him warily. He’s grief-torn, this man, and Julius doesn’t want to be near him when he starts to lash out.

“I don’t think we can win, now. Like this,” Julius corrects.

Silver twirls a dagger between his fingers. He looks distant. “Captain Flint and--Madi thought we could.” His voice catches on her name. Julius didn’t know the girl personally, only knew what he’d heard. That she was young and intelligent but idealistic. A girl who grew up sheltered, in an island of paradise. He has never met a person like him with no scars. It looks like he never will. Visible scars, anyway. He knows even if Madi was raised for the majority of her life away from under the white thumb, she will still feel the pain of her people.

“Captain Flint doesn’t care about the costs,” Julius says carefully. “He would rather burn this entire island to the ground before giving it up.”

Silver clenches his jaw. “What is the point of her death then, if we give up?”

“I can’t tell you that,” Julius says, tired. “I can only say that when you spend your whole life fighting, when your existence itself is a war, that continuing to do so when there is a chance at peace, at rest, for even just a decade, is too sweet to resist.” He eyes him. “You have not experienced our struggle. But I sense that you have struggled in some way, your entire life. You are too afraid of war to not have.”

Silver swallows hard, fingers clenching around his crutch until his knuckles turn white. Julius doesn’t need to know John Silver’s past, in fact is patently uninterested in it. But he knows Silver has the ear of the war general they’ve put in charge of this, and he’s clever and shrewd in a way that Julius respects. It is good to keep a man like Silver as an ally. He watches as Silver forces his fingers to unclench, the color slowly bleeding back into them.

“I can’t--” He shakes his head. “It has to be worth it,” he says grimly. Julius sighs and shrugs one shoulder.

“Perhaps.” Perhaps when Silver has wallowed in his grief enough, he’ll come to see it differently.

* * *

"Captain," the queen says, watching him quietly.

Flint holds out the bracelet, the brown beads only slightly stained by the sea. Something flickers in the queen's eyes as she takes it, running her thumb over the design on the biggest bead.

"She is alive," Flint says, head bowed under the low tent ceiling. "She wanted you to know."

"And yet, she isn't here."

"A martyr is better for war than a second leader," Flint murmurs. "So she said to me."

The queen sighs, lifting her eyes briefly to the heavens. "Of course she did. So she remains on Nassau."

Flint nods. "She seemed to have some sort of plan that runs parallel with ours."

The queen shakes her head. "Yes, I'm sure she did. She is much like her father in that way."

"If she is anything like him in keeping secrets, she should be fine."

"I think my husband's success in that was less about his talent for playing spy, and more that your kind don't expect secrets from us. You think us no more than barn animals."

Flint dips his head in acknowledgment. He won't argue with her about that. The queen squeezes the bracelet again.

"Well, I suppose we have no choice but to trust her. And to hope that one day we both see her again."

Flint nods. "There was one thing she mentioned. About the cache."

* * *

In between training the new men and planning their next round of attack, they spar together. Silver seems to find solace in it, in being able to pick up a sword and unleash his fury onto Flint. And he’s getting better, able to unhand him more than once during a round. 

“You know,” Silver says, the day before their next parting to Nassau. He’s panting, sweat dripping down the dip of his neck and collarbone as he parries Flint’s sword back. “You never tell _me_ about _your_ childhood. What was your mother like?”

Flint startles and Silver flicks the edge of his sword to Flint’s throat, eyes bright with energy and cunning. 

“I didn’t know her well,” Flint says after a moment, tipping his chin up and trusting his life to Silver’s blade. “My grandfather raised me.”

“Surely you remember something.” Silver raises his eyebrows.

“Surely you do too,” Flint counters and Silver’s sword arm trembles before he drops it, handing Flint the waterskin.

"You know that I--"

"I know," Flint says gently. "But I've given you the most important part of me. Don't push me for more."

Silver feels stung, though he knows it isn't fair of him. But he has grown used to being able to drink from Flint, to know more and more about him. As if the more he knows about Flint, the more he can bury himself in Flint's story and forget he ever had one. 

"Tell me about the plan, then. Explain to me how letting the men loose on Nassau like a pack of wolves helps us."

Flint snorts. "Well, it certainly can't hurt, can it? Keep Woodes Rogers distracted, and maybe if we're lucky, one of the men will kill Billy for us."

Silver sighs wistfully. "God, I hope so."

* * *

Julius and the queen meet often during that brief time between the pirates coming to the island and all of them leaving with Captain Flint and Silver. 

He finds the Maroon Queen smart and practical, more than willing to hear what he has to say.

“I told her to think about what she was doing,” she murmurs one day. “My daughter. She is-- _was_ smart and a good leader, but she was still young.”

“She was,” Julius agrees, a growing suspicion in his mind. “I am curious, Isheba. You do not act like a woman mourning.”

She gives him a dark look. “Do not make me regret allowing you the use of my name,” she says, voice low.

Julius raises his hands, placating. “I am only curious. You seem on the verge of something. News--anything.”

The queen shakes her head. “Perhaps one day I will tell you,” she says. “When I trust you more.”

Julius is amused by that. “Fair enough.”

* * *

“You look tired,” Flint murmurs and Silver presses his knuckles to his eyelids.

“It feels hopeless,” he admits. “Like I’m drowning.” Flint reaches out and touches his shoulder, and Silver leans into the touch.

"I suppose you’d know a little something about drowning, wouldn’t you?” he murmurs.

“So would you,” Silver counters, snorting. “We’ve both done our fair share of it.”

They’re quiet for a long moment and there’s a commotion outside, as tents are slowly packed up and things are put away, the dawn of leaving for Nassau nearly upon them. Flint lets go of him and Silver nearly begs for him to touch him again.

“I’d better check what the men are up to now,” he says, sounding reluctant, and leaves him in their tent.

Silver is quiet for a long time, then reaches into his pocket to pull something out. A long, thin letter, water-damaged but legible.

_John Silver,_

_This is proof that I am who you think I am--Thomas Hamilton, though I don’t go by that name anymore. I have heard of you, Mr. Silver, though I can’t imagine why you’ve heard of me. I look forward to meeting you one day to ask these questions in person, even if you are trying to ransom me. I should warn you, my father sent me here, and even if he were alive, he would have no desire to save me._

_-T. Barlow_

* * *

When Silver dreams, he dreams of Madi. How she must have looked at the end, skin dirty, breath straining and weak in her chest. How the ash must have turned her skin grey.

He dreams of Madi burning, the flames licking at her clothes, of her mouth open and soundless, eyes wide and terrified. Nobody had been there--Flint had come back too late, only long enough to watch the house collapse and to hold Eleanor while she died.

The letter has been burning a hole in his pocket for a week now. The war, the long slog of training, of knowing he's sending men out to their deaths--he knows that this was Madi's dream, that it is now Flint's. But he already lost one person he loves.

"If you had a way to make things end, even if it tore you apart from the last person you have, would you do it?" Silver asks the cat that wounds its way around his ankle, purring softly. The cat just rubs its face against Silver's hand until Silver pets it, scratching gently behind its ears. He sighs.

He pulls out a piece of paper and dips his quill in ink, writing something quickly. The cat jumps onto his bed, curling up in the warm spot his body has left behind and falling asleep right there as the ink dries on the paper. Under the bed, he grabs a small bag of gold. Even if he doesn't decide to go through with this, it's good to have it in his back pocket. An option, just in case.

* * *

It is an interesting place, the island of the Maroons. Idyllic, and Julius thinks of those he couldn’t save with an ache in his chest, imagining his son running through forest, splashing in the creek water, his laughter echoing against the trees. Right now it is filled with pirates and former slaves alike, and everything is in uproar ever since word reached that their princess was alive. Julius makes his way through throngs of people, stopping next to Silver’s familiar figure, standing away from the crowd with a pensive look on his face.

He glances at Julius. “I think I’m open to hear what you have to say now,” he says, and of course, Julius thinks, amused. Anything to keep those you love alive. That, he can understand. “But I won’t kill him.”

“That wouldn’t work anyway.” Julius leans against the tree nearby, watching Silver’s expression. “There is no better thing to keep a war going than a martyr. And Flint’s death will do nothing but incite more fighting. No, it will be better if he is alive. If he gives up.”

Silver snorts. “He’ll never do that.”

“Wouldn’t he?” Julius asks. “He is a man like anyone else. Find the weakness inside him, and expose it.”

Silver is quiet, a soft frown on his face. “There might be…” He trails off and frowns more, then shakes his head.

“I can handle the Maroon Queen,” Julius says, raising his eyebrows. “She doesn’t seem overly fond of you.”

“No,” Silver murmurs. “She isn’t.” He turns to look at Julius. “So, tell me, how does one stop a war and keep anyone else from dying?”

Julius smiles.

* * *

Silver still hates sailing. He hates how unbalanced he feels on one leg, how he has to use ropes to navigate the deck. He hates how he can't even climb the rigging anymore, the only thing he had enjoyed before he lost his leg. 

He closes the cabin door behind him and sits on the chair across from Flint with a grunt. Flint doesn't glance up at him.

"How are the men?" he asks, making marks on the maps.

"Fine," he says. "Ready to be unleashed."

Flint snorts. "Good. And the Maroons?"

"Happy enough to also fight." It's harder without Madi there to make them feel welcome, but no other incidents have happened since the last time, when Silver made it clear just what he would do if he caught the Walrus men acting up.

Flint finally looks up. "And your leg?" he asks. Silver makes a face.

"It was easier when I had the iron leg."

"That leg also gave you infections. Forgive me for not being upset that it's gone."

Silver sighs dramatically and looks at his hands. 

"Do you miss Madi?"

He's never asked, though he knows Flint and Madi became close when they thought he had died. Flint stills, a strange expression on his face.

"I do," he says quietly. "She was my friend."

"You just miss having someone to talk books with," Silver replies with forced lightness.

"Can't talk about them with you, can I?" Flint asks wryly and Silver throws a piece of bread at it, grinning when Flint laughs. It feels good to laugh, to remember that he can be happy still, even with the grief still suffocating him some days.

* * *

Of course, that's when everything completely falls apart. 

"Man overboard!" Silver yells. They'd barely arrived on Nassau Island, a far, desolate corner where they'd been sure nobody would be--but they'd underestimated Woodes Rogers's paranoia. The Walrus is untouched anchored far enough away, but men drop from the tender, their blood staining the water crimson. Silver looks around wildly, catching a glimpse of Flint's beard. They make it to land and the men onshore attack, a small militia full of mostly lower class Naval men and pirates who betrayed them, their fighting messy and unfocused compared to the last battle in Nassau proper.

Silver snarls at one as he stabs him through the chest, a dark, pleased feeling in his chest at the fear on his face when he dies. Suddenly, Flint is next to him, and the two of them fight side by side and back to back, Flint moving like he's dancing, pure poetry on land. There's a sound of pain and Silver's heart beats through his throat.

"Captain," he says, and Flint just stabs the man who'd slashed at him in the throat, watching impassively as he dies.

The skirmish is short and brutal, and the beach is streaked with dead bodies and blood, though most of their men have lived. 

"There goes our surprise," Flint says, panting hard as he watches a few stragglers make a run for it, back to Nassau proper. He jerks his head at the bodies. "Might as well burn them."

Silver grips his wrist. "You're bleeding," he says, letting the men collect the dead. 

"I'm fine," he says automatically, wincing when Silver tugs at Flint's shirt to reveal the chest wound. 

"Shut up." Silver cleans the cut as best as he can, his heart racing. It had been so close to his heart, any lower, any deeper, and--

He bandages Flint's skin a little roughly, not noticing his hands shaking until Flint grasps his forearm.

"I'm _fine._ "

Silver glares at him. "You could easily have not been," he snaps, jerking his hand from Flint's grip and stomping away to help the men, not noticing Flint staring at him as he leaves, something soft and fragile in his expression.

* * *

They make camp on a deserted stretch of the island, a skeleton crew on the Walrus. After Silver walks off his fury, he barely leaves his side, and when he does, it’s only to make his rounds with the men again. Flint disappears to piss, and nearly jumps out of his mind when a hand claps him on the shoulder, hand going to his pistol.

“ _Christ,”_ he says, recognizing Kofi. “How is she?”

“Safe.” He hands him the note and squints out at the men.

“Are _you_ safe?” he asks.

“There was a skirmish," he says, skimming the note. "I'm sure you saw the fire." 

“And the cache?”

Flint looks up and Kofi just watches him patiently. Madi had not told him where it was, but she had told him of it.

“On the ship,” he says after a moment. Kofi frowns.

“Safe?”

Flint arches an eyebrow and Kofi shrugs.

“If I know anything about your quartermaster, is that he always has three plans behind the one everyone thinks they’re using. It would not surprise me if he did that to you, as well.”

Flint looks out at the men, watching Silver talk to Hands, and he frowns deeply, in thought, then shakes his head a little.

“Tell Madi I’m glad she’s well, and thank her for the message.”

Kofi inclines his head and disappears into the night.

* * *

“I miss her still,” Silver says softly as Flint settles down beside him, staring out at the night sky. The men are settled, talking quietly amongst themselves or splitting a bottle of rum. Tomorrow, most will stay, dispersing themselves among the island, while a core crew will leave. They don’t know that yet, but tomorrow, Flint will tell them. Tomorrow, Flint will tell Silver. The wound on his chest throbs.

“I still miss Thomas,” Flint says honestly.

“Does it ever get better?” Silver’s eyes glitter under the starlight, the moon turning strands of his hair silver. Flint can’t stop staring, his heart caught in his throat.

“No.” Flint twists a ring on his finger. “It hardens, scars over, but it never goes away.”

“It’s been years,” Silver says softly and Flint smiles faintly.

“I might just be bad at moving on,” he admits and Silver laughs, a hurt sound.

“What would Thomas think about this? All of it?”

“He’d hate it,” Flint says, voice low. “He’d hate who I’ve become.”

Silver watches him again, then looks down, their hands so close that if his finger so much as twitched, they’d be touching pinkies. He wants, as he always has with Flint near him. It had been so easy to ignore before, so easy to lose himself in Madi. Madi, who aches inside him like a phantom limb. He exhales softly.

“Then why do it?” He thinks of Julius, of Madi’s mother, of a treaty folded neatly in his jacket, tucked right next to a letter burning at his skin. And the second copy, with them, just in case.

Flint pulls a ring off his finger to look at it, the moon glinting silver against the metal. 

“When I was a boy in Cornwall, I used to go to the docks and watch the fishermen bring in their catch.” The fish had been slippery and slick, and the men, their skin brown and leathery from the sun, would haul the nets up, arms thick and ropey with muscle. “Everyday they’d go, rain or shine, no matter what was happening in their lives. I always dreamed of taking Thomas there, one day, after his plan with Nassau had settled.”

He sighs and twists the ring so that the moon shines off of it. “I know now that Thomas’s idea for this island were flawed. That my own were. Madi and her people have shown me many things, and my decade on this island has showed me even more. But I would like to think that the end result of this is exactly what he would have wanted. A free Nassau.”

He takes Silver’s hand and Silver nearly jolts in surprise, watching with wide eyes as Flint puts the ring on his palm. 

“Try it,” he says. “It’s too big on me.”

Silver slips it onto his finger finger, where it nestles against his knuckles. A perfect fit. Flint smiles faintly, mostly hidden by his beard.

“Like I thought. It suits you.” He gets up, wincing when his knees crack. Silver makes a soft sound mostly hidden by Flint’s bad knees.

“Get some rest,” Flint says, mostly avoiding Silver’s gaze, resolutely ignoring the noise he’d made and the sharp way he’d inhaled when Flint had touched his hand. 

“Captain,” Silver calls and Flint pauses, turning back to look at him. His heart is pounding at the look in Silver’s eyes, and he _knows_ this is a bad idea, can feel the weight of Madi’s beads as if they’re still in his pocket and not tucked safely in his satchel. But he can’t help it, can’t say no when Silver takes his hand, when he tugs him to his tent, the sun fully set so that he can just barely make out Silver’s eyes.

Silver’s hands on him are a revelation, the steady, heavy weight behind them, the possessive splay of his fingers on Flint’s hip, holding him down. Flint feels like he’s splintering, damp with sweat and panting against each other. Silver looks wide-eyed and dazed, eyes hot on Flint’s mouth. His other hand slides up and presses on the swollen lower lip, tingling from Silver’s own teeth sinking into it and sucking.

Flint parts his lips because _those hands,_ those incongruously large hands on Silver’s lithe body, so big and strong it feels like they could press him down and force him to take it. Silver’s finger gleams with Flint’s saliva and Flint can still taste the metal from his ring, the ring that he _gave_ him, he realizes with a thrill.

“Captain,” Silver says and Flint kisses him, trying not to think of Madi, trying not to think of betrayal, and the hurt look in her eyes when she finds out. But, god, he wants. He wants this in a way he hasn’t wanted in so long, their clothes discarded next to them, skin to skin, hips pressed together. 

“Have you ever…?” Flint asks and he can feel Silver swallow though it’s too dark to see the look in his eyes.

“Not like this,” he says and Flint presses their foreheads together, the two of them breathing, and touching Silver is what he imagines refinding faith is like, that moment when, after so long not hearing His voice, you hear God again. The relief. Flint drinks in Silver’s soft cries, the trust of his body under his like the sacrament it’s made to be.

He takes it, greedy, and he falls.

* * *

“So, she is alive?” Julius asks, unsurprised.

The queen eyes him. “She is.”

“John Silver does not know.”

She shakes her head. “Captain Flint saved her, I know that. But at this point…” She sighs. “We have lost much. I don’t have a lot of hope for this war.”

If Madi ever comes back, he’d like to meet her one day. The loyalty she has inspired from even the most disloyal men is something indeed. “But this will give her more time to become the leader you want her to be.”

“If it doesn’t break her spirit first,” she sighs. “You do not know my daughter, Julius. You make good points, but you have not seen her when she has something set in her mind. This will hit her worse than a blow.” She shakes her head. “She will survive, but I don’t know in what way that will be.”

“Will you follow your daughter’s wishes, or what’s best for your people?” Julius asks.

She gives him a sharp look. “Don’t presume to tell me how to rule. Your people respect you, but my people have been listening to me for far longer on this island. I know very well what I must do.”

Julius raises his hands. He won’t argue with that.

* * *

“There is something you should know,” Flint says, watching Silver as he wakes up, the way he scrunches his nose and yawns, the slow slide to awareness that only happens with Flint. It makes him feel warm.

Silver glances at him sleepily.

“Eleanor told me something before she died. That Madi told her. She said we needed to move the chest. That Woodes Rogers would come for the island now that he knows where it is.”

Silver props himself up on his elbows.

“That’s why you put the chest on the ship,” he says, and Flint looks at him in surprise. Silver smiles wryly. “You didn’t think I’d notice a large chest next to the potatoes? I used to work down there, remember?”

“I thought you’d avoid it,” Flint says with a grin. “Bad associations and all that.”

Silver snorts but he watches him. “So where are we taking it?”

“Have you ever heard the tale of Henry Avery?”

* * *

Silver is vibrating anxiously next to Flint as Nassau creeps further and further away. 

“How do we know Eleanor wasn’t lying?” he asks Flint.

“She was dying,” Flint says, the lie tasting sour on his mouth. “What would she have to lie about?”

Silver exhales sharply, the horizon clear and blue as far as he can see. 

“I don’t like this.” 

Flint can’t help but agree. Every moment closer to Skeleton Island feels like stepping closer to damnation.

Whether that is his own, Silver’s, or the end of everything--he doesn’t know. 

Skeleton Island is something out of a nightmare, creeping in from the fog. There's a silence to it, oppressive and heavy, that feels final. That feels like a resting place. Where men go to die and ghosts are born.   
  
Even the men are quiet, usually rowdy when they sight land. DeGroot and Dooley exchange uneasy looks the closer they get.

" _James_!" A voice cries out in the gloom and Silver lifts his head, white as a ghost. He mouths Madi's name silently.

Suddenly, the fog lifts, and a ship appears. "James, _watch out!"_

Madi is by the ledge, alive, gloriously, wondrously _alive_ and Silver doesn't even notice Woodes Rogers standing near her, doesn't notice the cannon coming towards them until Flint knocks him down, the ball just avoiding the ship and crashing into the water next to them. 

Woodes Rogers has Madi by the throat, a gun to her head.

"Gentlemen," he calls. "I've come to take what's mine."


	2. babylon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Madi, and ghosts, and names.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE'S CHAPTER TWO

When Madi leaves Flint, she finds herself in a quiet hideaway just outside of Nassau. A place her father’s spies had created, just in case. Eme looks at her and Madi studies her frame--demure but confident, a hidden steel to her spine. She sees why her father chose her.

“Is it to your liking, Queen Madi?” Eme asks, voice soft in the dark.

Madi manages a small smile. “It’s fine, Eme. Please, call me Madi. I have a feeling you and I will be spending a lot of time together.”

Eme takes a step forward, and then another, taking the kindling that Madi has in her hands, that she’s forgotten that she was holding. Her fingers slide gently along Madi’s skin and Madi shivers, startling at the physical contact. She closes her eyes, seeing John’s dark hair and soft face, his bright smile when he looked at her, and has to take a deep breath to compose herself.

“Who are the men outside?” she asks, opening her eyes to a warm orange glow. Eme turns to look away from the fire, her eyes mirroring the flame. 

“Two men your father trusted. One is my brother,” she says. “They will protect you and be able to travel to and from Nassau without suspicion.”

Nodding, Madi sits down heavily, running a hand over her face. It comes back wet and she stares at the blood on her fingers, seeing them tremble as if from a great distance. She had forgotten, briefly, that not hours ago she’d been a prisoner, that Woodes Rogers had threatened her and John, had dangled him in front of him to try to win her war. 

She loves her husband, fiercely, desperately. But he is not more important than this war. Still, she stares at the blood, rubbing it between her fingers. 

“Quee--Madi!” Eme says, hurrying forward. “You’re hurt!”

“Not too badly,” she says with a weak smile. “I will be fine.”

“Let me clean it for you, at least,” Eme says, and Madi nods, eyes half shut as exhaustion runs over her suddenly. She hears Eme dip a washcloth into a bucket of still water, wringing it out, and then feels cool fingers on her chin, tipping her head up. She keeps her eyes closed as Eme washes her face in smooth, sure strokes, and if she notices the drops of tears sliding down her cheeks, she doesn’t say.

It stays quiet as Eme finishes, going back over to the bucket to soak the rag. Madi opens her eyes to watch.

“I think I will rest now,” Madi says quietly.

Eme looks at her from over her shoulder, dipping her head in response. “I will be here when you wake, miss,” she says.

“Madi,” she corrects absently, around a yawn as she stands. She misses Eme’s small smile and how she mouths the word, watching her go into the small room with a cot.

When Madi sleeps that night, it’s to troubled dreams, of John collapsing in a pool of his own blood, his mouth red with it. Of Flint drowning, his green eyes open even in death. Of fire scorching her island, her people succumbing to the red flames.

* * *

When she wakes the next day, there is a plate of bread and dried ham on the table near the fire, and no sight of Eme or her brother anywhere nearby. She splashes water on her face and stares at her reflection, purposefully not thinking about Silver. Closing her eyes, she lets out a soft breath, clinging to the side of the bucket until her knuckles tighten. 

“Madi?” Eme asks and Madi turns her head, letting go of the bucket. She flexes her fingers, bringing feeling back into them, and fixes a small smile on her face.

“Eme,” she says. “Sit with me to eat?”

Eme eyes her but does as she says, and Madi takes a small bite of her bread. 

“Now,” she says. “Can you tell me about Nassau? Who is in charge here?”

“Well, Governor Rogers--”

Madi snorts and gives her a look. “Who’s _really_ in charge? Who has the ear of the island?”

“Max,” Eme says after a moment. “It used to be Max. Still is, really.”

“Tell me about her.”

And Eme does. She weaves a story of a woman who crawled from the very bottom, from a common whore, to the mistress, to the owner, to a veritable spymaster.

“She looks like us,” Eme says, admiring despite herself. “And she doesn’t want what we want, but she doesn’t really want what Woodes Rogers wants either.”

“She doesn’t want freedom?” Madi asks, frowning.

Eme taps her her fingers on the table. “It isn’t that.” She pauses, thinking. “I don’t know her well. Sometimes I take shifts while she’s with the girls and hear her talk.” At Madi’s eyebrows Eme gives her a quick grin. “Nobody notices me much. I’m good at making myself small. But I think it’s stupid to think anyone knows what she’s thinking. She’s not here right now, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t watching. She always is, with this island, with this town. Don’t know what it is about Nassau, but it imprints on you, makes you think it’s yours. And I think, if anyone has a right to thinking that, it’s her.”

“Could we get her onto our side?” Madi looks curious.

“Only if we made her a _very_ good deal.”

* * *

Nassau is crowded and hot, and of course she had been, but somehow it’s still another thing entirely to see it this way--the bodies cleared up and business as usual, except for the naval men wandering the streets. Nobody knows who she is, what she looks like, except for Woodes Rogers himself, but she’s counting on him never noticing the slaves or freed people. Their kind aren’t trained to look at them as anything more than another animal. She’s learned that lesson well.

Someone tall crosses the street and she pulls her shawl around her face, hurrying behind Eme. For a moment, she’d thought...but it wasn’t him.

Eme glances at her, taking her hand. “I usually work in the Governor’s house,” she murmurs. “But he’ll recognize you. And you’ll get the most gossip from the brothel.”

Madi nods, and Eme flashes her a small smile as she pushes open the backdoor. “You can shadow Nyoka.”

A slim woman with her hair coiled over her head glances up at the sound of her name. 

“Nyoka,” Eme says. “This is Mari.”

“Are you from the new batch?” Nyoka asks, thrusting a bowl into her hand. “How did you manage to get her away?”

“I escaped myself,” Madi says, starting to help stir the ingredients in the bowl. “Eme took me in.”

“Sweet of her,” Nyoka says, appraising Eme, who shrugs. 

“Must get to work. You know how it goes.”

“He’s in a bad mood today,” Nyoka warns. “Some news about Miss Guthrie.”

 _Eleanor,_ Madi thinks with a pang, her determined, hard face appearing in her mind. Despite everything, she isn’t happy Eleanor is dead. No, she had not trusted her, just as she didn’t trust any of them.

 _Not even your husband,_ a traitorous thought drifts through her mind and she shoves it ruthlessly down. She can’t think about him. There’s too much at stake. She takes a deep breath and prepares for her day. 

* * *

Madi finishes writing her note and then hands it to Kofi, who squeezes her hand.

“I’m fine,” she says, voice soft. “You saw his ship today?”

“Far on the horizon, on the other side of the island, so one of my men told me.”

Madi nods. “Good. Then give him that. He needs to know Billy has switched sides.”

Eme had rushed back to pick her up after an illuminating if exhausting day working in the brothel, and had whispered about a pirate Governor Rogers was conspiring with. It could only be Billy. There was no one else.

“I will pass it along.”

“Make sure he isn’t with,” she swallows. “John.”

Kofi nods, squeezing her hand again, and he’s gone. Madi slumps in her seat and nearly startles when she feels hands on her shoulders, taking the shawl from her.

“Just me,” she says softly and Madi sighs, relaxing, and lets herself lean back into Eme’s hands. Lets herself close her eyes and trust Eme completely.

* * *

She likes to walk along the shore, to look at the water and to see the children play. In town, she hears John’s name-- _Long John Silver,_ a ghost, a demon. A black spot to you would strike you dead in your sleep. 

He’s a story you tell your children to get them to sleep, a menacing creature who haunts your dreams. 

A ball rolls to her feet and she looks up, a few children flopped on the sand, panting. She takes the ball and walks towards them, sitting down too.

Children in Nassau are easy--hardly cared for, quick to steal and quick to spread information. She eyes them curiously.

“Would you three like to hear a story?” she asks.

“What for?” one child replies, her dark hair in messy pigtails, nose streaked with dirt.

“No reason. I have far too many stories inside of me and nobody to listen to me. You’d be doing me a favor.”

Two of the children sit up and the other looks at her, curious. 

“Have you ever heard of the Free Island?” she asks. “Those that look like us?”

“Mama said there ain’t any of those around anymore,” pig-tailed child says, but she looks interested despite herself.

“Oh, but there are,” she says. “Those who live away from here, away from the bakra. Those who live without judgment from Babylon.”

The boy with dreads stares at her with wide eyes. “How do we get there?”

Madi smiles. “Well what if I tell you that they were trying to come here? To make this a haven. That a woman rose up from the dead, killed by the white man controlling this island, and is here for revenge. Would you like to hear that story?”

The children nod, completely enraptured, and Madi leans forward.

* * *

There was once a girl-child born on Nassau, eyes so wise it was like she’d seen what the earth had to give her, and was back to see it once more. Perhaps, this time it could please her.

She grew up playing with a child whose skin was white where hers was dark, whose hair was golden and eyes cornflower blue. When she was young, that did not matter to her, until she noticed that the girl she considered a sister was always plumper, and stronger, skin softer. That she was always given more. 

One day, a storm happened. The island was overrun and filled with white men fighting, with blood and terror, and her father, eyes dark and determined, put the girl and her mother on a little boat and pushed them away, into the dark, fathomless water, into freedom and fear.

To Paradise. An island filled with people like her. 

And on this island, the girl grew. She grew strong and wild and free, and her mother became a queen, with the expectation that the daughter would follow after her.

(“How did she get here?” the girl asks crossly, sucking on her thumb.

“I’ll get to it soon,” Madi promises.)

The thing about this island, this paradise away from Babylon, was that it needed to be defended. The white-men, the bakra, the downpressers, were always ready to take them back.

The girl saw her first dead man at age fifteen.

(“Saw mine when I was twelve!" the boy says proudly, and the girl rolls her eyes and shoves him back onto the ground.

"Shh!")

A white-skinned one, the kind of man she'd run from, the kind of man who lived in that place her mother called Babylon.

She studied his features, the sallow tint to his skin, pale like the underbelly of a dead fish. The cluster of freckles under his eye. The way his skin began to turn purple. She watched him until her mother noticed she was watching and then pulled her away.

So how does this girl die and come back to life? Why, because of a white-man.

She-who-fought-for-freedom, breaker-of-chains, a man burned her body and she rose, rose like a phoenix.

She rose up, out of the ashes, and now she haunts this island still, waiting for the moment when she can bring freedom to them all.

("What was her name?" the little girl asks, eager, eyes bright.

"Madi of the Maroons.")

* * *

The name spreads--she hears it as she walks, her head wrapped in a shawl. A ghost, a magic-bringer. She remembers in her youth, her mother teaching her the science of their people, the kind of knowledge she still has though rarely practices.

They say Madi of the Maroons could catch bullets and throw them back, that she could boil a pot of water without a flame. They say she was a wise-woman, and that if she looked a white-man in the eye, she stole his soul, and used it to feed the hungry.

Madi slips into the dungeons, the key Eme stole from Woodes Rogers's collection at her hip. She frees men down their, black men who had dared defy him, her face covered in every way but her eyes. She leaves the chains broken, and the key she gives back to Eme, who slips it back as if it was never gone.

The men claim a shadow freed them, a woman who had felt real, but who never spoke, and they never saw her face. 

"Madi of the Maroons," they said. A Queen, martyred, still freeing them. 

"What do you hope to accomplish from this?" Eme asks one day when Madi comes back from work, braiding Madi's hair like she does when she's restless. Madi lets her, Eme's fingers soothing against her scalp.

"Fear," she says. "Discord. A thread of loyalty to me should I decide to reveal myself."

"There are those who don't believe it," Eme says. "And those who don't want to follow a ghost. Or even a real person at all."

Madi sighs. "I can never win everyone. There will always be those who want to go about things differently."

"Ruth thinks this war is pointless. That all it will do is cause more bloodshed."

"Maybe she's right," Madi says. "But what kind of person would I be if I didn't try? How could I face my people without telling them I made my best effort to give them a free life? To give all of us a free life. I speak for the voices of many. Not just the island, but those from my past and future, crying out inside me to do something, _anything,_ to help them. I dream of them, these people I don't know, who I only recognize by face."

"Perhaps there is a bit of wise-woman in you," Eme says softly. 

Madi shakes her head. "It's the voices we all here. I know you do too, in your nightmares, when you cry out in your sleep." She tips her head back to look at her. "Don't be ashamed of it. It's the burden we all share."

Eme's hands still. "You have had a different life than most of us," she says. "I'll follow you, you know I will. But you don't have the scars we do, like your father did. You grew up _free._ "

Madi turns her head and takes Eme's hand. "I want our sons and daughters to grow up the same way. With less fear than me, without the pressing knowledge that as soon as we were discovered, everything would fall apart."

Eme gazes at her, eyes dark and knowing.

"This is what you've been raised to do, isn't it? You are so like your father."

Madi withdraws her hand, feeling empty. "You would know that better than me."

"He loved you."

Her smiles is humorless. "I know he did. But it still feels like betrayal that he knew so many other people more than me. The pirates around here all knew him better than I did."

"No, they didn't. They knew what he showed them. They knew him as Mr. Scott, as Eleanor's property. They didn't know him as you did."

Madi sighs and rubs a hand over her face, and Eme finally drops her hands out of Madi's hair, finished braiding.

"Well, Madi of the Maroons," she says softly. "Why don't we go to bed? You have a long day of causing disruption tomorrow." 

Madi jerks her head up at that, her heart stuttering in her chest, but no, Eme just meant. Madi swallows and nods. 

"Goodnight, Eme," she says, standing up. 

"Goodnight, Madi," Eme murmurs, watching her retire to her bed.

* * *

There's something disconcerting about having a conversation with someone and hearing them say your own name. She goes by Mari here, which is close enough to her own name that it's fine. But Madi of the Maroons is a name that has surpassed her, and she feels a kinship with her own husband whenever he'd heard the way people said Long John Silver. 

"Do you think she is real?" she asks Nyoka in what she hopes is a neutral voice.

"I don't know about flesh and blood," Nyoka says. "But I know Nani saw someone let loose a pack of dogs against one of them dock sentries. Those dogs haven't ever hurt a living being, and suddenly they turned on him like wolves, ripped him apart."

Madi hides a small smile and reminds herself to give one of the street boys an extra coin. He's done his job even better than she expected.

She wonders if she should feel perturbed by the ease in which she kills men, even indirectly. But revolution has never come without bloodshed--something she has learned well from the battle on her own island, and the feral look in Flint's eyes across the river at the end of it. She finds herself more and more comfortable, especially as fear spreads throughout the British officers on the island.

"Did Nani see this person's face?"

Nyoka shakes her head, scrubbing her pot as the sun begins to set behind her, pinks and blues staining the brothel kitchen walls. "Funny that--Nani said it seemed like the...thing, just faded away, right into the shadows. Madi of the Maroons." She sounds both amused and awed and Madi scrubs her own pan so that her smile doesn't betray her. She wonders if it's different for her, controlling her own narrative in a way John was never able to do. Long John Silver, Billy Bones's creation, a creature that soon far surpassed its master and the man it was based on.

To Madi, Long John Silver has always felt like an amalgamation of John and Flint. He is what Billy Bones wanted John to be, and John had no choice in it. He had risen up to the task admirably, but she knows John feels no real happiness from it. Or he hadn't. She's not sure, now, how much Flint's own appetite for blood and vengeance has changed him, how much he'll use her death to keep fighting. 

("He will fight for me like you fight for your Thomas," Madi had told Flint, and Flint's face had tightened.

"He is not the same man as I am," Flint had said. "His rage doesn't burn as hot and quick. He's just as likely to run and protect himself from seeing _me_ die as well, as he is throwing himself into this rage."

Madi's breath had caught. "So you do know."

Flint had given her a look. "I'm not blind. But he loves you more than anything. And I don't think _he_ knows."

"I wouldn't have begrudged him."

Flint snorted softly. "Maybe not now," he'd said. "But you would've, during those summer months when I knew." And of course, he was right. She hadn't liked Flint then, hadn't trusted him. It was only after they'd both thought him dead that she found herself softening. And now, caught in this lie together.)

At the end, it had been a gamble they were both willing to take. But she wonders if the man she'll see again will be one she recognizes. She wonders if he will recognize her.

* * *

"I have to get on the ship," Madi tells Eme, face drawn and tight when Eme tells her the news. 

"He _will_ recognize you then," Eme says, frowning. "He's ignorant, but he's not stupid."

Madi shakes her head. "My name runs through this island," she says. "Even if Max comes back with a whole new governor, that one will never be able to eradicate what I have done. You can't erase a ghost story, Eme." She leans forward, and Eme's fingers flex, like she wants to move them. Madi grabs them to keep them still and she exhales sharply.

"Isn't that just back to where you were?" she asks, voice quiet. "In his custody?"

Madi shakes his head. "I have power here. They don't know my face, but they know my name. I have _you_ and Kofi and your brothers and so many others who will continue to spread it. But I have to be on that ship, following Captain Flint. I have to warn them about Billy, and I have to follow this to where it will end, and the only way to do that is to get on that ship."

Eme grips Madi's hands suddenly, squeezing them. "You can't die," she says, voice fierce. "You're more than a name to me, don't you understand?"

Madi is taken aback. "Eme, I--"

Eme shakes her head, eyes fierce. "No, hush. Long John Silver is a ghost. A nightmare, a children's story. You're _more_ than that. Madi of the Maroons isn't a ghost story. She's a legend, she's history. She's ours and as long as you live, she will continue to be real. She will continue to inspire hope."

Madi gently runs her thumb along Eme's palm, her heart aching in her chest for this wonderful woman, this woman who has become her friend, who has become more. "She will continue after me. I planned it that way, can't you see? I want her to be a movement. I want her to be hope if all else fails. I want her to plant that seed inside of all of our people, a call to war, no matter how distant it may be. Something that will inspire us to be free, if everything I do fails. I'm only human, Eme."

Eme, taking a shaky breath, cups Madi's face with her hands, gazing at her for a long, long time. Madi stares back, her heart pounding. It's suddenly vitally important that Eme believe her, that only Eme's opinion matters. She feels exposed--Eme seeing inside her in a way she's never felt before. Seeing the part of her that loves John but knows he won't understand her actions, seeing the part of her that is slowly crusting over with each kill done in her name. She's taking Madi's good and bad and weighing it in her hands, and Madi hopes desperately that the good outweighs every morally bankrupt thing she's ever done.

Eme finally lets go of Madi's face and she feels bereft and winded at the same time, like she's passed a test but that the reward wasn't quite what she wanted.

"I can put you on the house staff," Eme says quietly. "From there, it is up to you."

"Thank you, Eme." Madi's voice is soft and Eme shakes her head.

"I don't agree with this plan," she says. "But I cannot talk you out of it. So I will help you. But you must promise to be careful."

"I will," Madi says immediately. "I promise."

Eme gives her a pained look but nods, then stands up. "I'm going to bed," she says, not looking at Madi. Madi watches her go, then cleans the dishes, the room quiet as the fire in the hearth slowly dies.

* * *

Governor Rogers's household is a mess, is the first thing Madi notices. Without Eleanor there to run it like a naval ship, rooms are sloppy, and furniture and shelves are covered in dust. She makes no move to fix that, and Governor Rogers doesn't seem to notice. He's constantly in meetings, or holed up in his room writing letters. The scar on his face seems to get deeper, more vibrant, and he looks at everything vaguely. There is a lady, a Mrs. Hudson, who seems just as listless and lost. She hears her talking to Governor Rogers occasionally, but they both always leave those meetings look more upset than when they left.

On her last day of her first week, a skirmish happens on the edge of the island. For all intents and purposes, it's a massacre--but one of her sources tells her that they'd captured one of Flint's men.

She wraps her headscarf around her face and makes her way to the dungeon, where she knows he's being kept. The man is worse for wear, eyes swollen shut, lips puffy, blood slowly dripping down his nose. 

"Andrew," she says, recognizing him, and he startles, chains rattling.

"Who's there?" His voice is loud against the walls and she can see the guard's shadow move in the lantern light.

"Shh," she murmurs, covering his mouth. "It doesn't matter. What I need you to tell me is what you told Mr. Bones."

Andrew spits out blood at her feet. "Fuckin' traitor," he mutters.

"Yes," Madi agrees. "He is. And I'm not on his side."

"You that ghost everyone's talkin' about?" he asks and Madi is surprised.

"You can call me that."

"Same name as Mr. Silver's wife. She died, though." 

Madi sighs, needing to hurry along the questioning before Andrew's addled brain begins to make connections.

"Andrew," she says sharply, gripping his cracked jaw. "Tell me what you told Billy."

He winces, making a high sound of pain. "They're sailing off to Henry Avery's island. A cursed island. Where things die." His voice is frightened, and his swollen eyes struggle to make out her face. "Who _are_ you?"

Madi lets go of him, satisfied. "Like I said, nobody who will concern you, Mr. Spencer."

And she slips away, silent as a ghost.

* * *

"You're leaving," Eme says flatly, watching Madi clean. 

"Their ship is leaving soon, and I know Billy Bones will be having a meeting with him tonight to plan logistics. I have to be there."

Eme frowns deeply and Madi stops, holding out her palms.

"What would you have me do, Eme? Let my husband face him alone?" she asks helplessly.

"You've let him do everything else alone up until this point."

Madi winces, fingers curling in her palms. "That isn't fair. You know why I did it."

"I do," she says. "But I don't see why this is different."

"This is the end." Madi watches her. "Can't you feel it? It all comes down to this. He wants the cache, and he knows where they're taking it. That cache is ours, to help us fight this war. To win it."

Eme shakes her head. "I don't see why you have to be there."

"I will _not_ let three white men decide the fate of my people," Madi says coldly and Eme flinches, which immediately makes her regret her tone. She takes a step forward, and then another, and another, until she's facing Eme, so close she could touch her. Eme is very still.

"Would you trust them?" she asks softly. 

"One is your husband," she says weakly.

"Yes," Madi agrees. "And yet, I still don't trust him with this. You know why I have to be there. You're smarter than this, Eme."

A wild, determined look crosses Eme's face and she takes a step forward, in Madi's space, cups her face and kisses her hard. Madi makes a surprised sound against her mouth, and before she can respond, Eme breaks the kiss and steps back.

"Fine," Eme says, eyes bright, filled with fury and fear and terror and a thousand other things Madi can't name. "You're right. Good luck, Madi, and don't you _dare_ die." She stalks out of the cabin and slams the door behind her.

"I won't," Madi says to the empty air in front of her, touching her mouth with her finger.

* * *

The room stinks like fear when she makes her way inside of it, quiet as she slips through the cracked door. Lit only by a dying candle between the two of them, the flickering shadows makes her work easy to go unnoticed. 

“The man who is helping you is a traitor,” Madi says, and Billy jerks his head up, hand to his gun. Madi has her own out already, eyeing him coolly, and tugs her headscarf off.

“You,” Rogers says flatly. “I was wondering where you’d run off to.”

“I am sure you’ve heard whispers of me in town.” Rogers is unarmed, though she knows that doesn’t make him any less dangerous.

“Why have you shown yourself to me now?”

Madi nods to the journal. “You think Captain Flint doesn’t already know of that island?"

Billy’s hand tightens on the journal.

“The man you’re aligning yourself with thinks he has Long John Silver’s ear,” Madi says, eyes flinty. “He thinks he can convince him to turn on Captain Flint, to give you the cache. There is nothing that can tear the two of them apart, not now. You lost it when you lost me.”

“So, what are you doing here now?” Woodes Rogers says, eyeing the gun in her hand. 

She smiles grimly. "I'm surrendering myself to you."

* * *

She's in better accommodations this time around as a prisoner, she notes. No chains, and she still has the three knives on her person. No gun, but then she's never been too comfortable with them anyway.

She has to admit to herself that her plan may have been a bit hasty. She has no idea what she'll say when Woodes Rogers inevitably uses her as bait for both John and Flint. She just knows she needs to make sure that they aren't caught by surprise. To her displeasure, Rogers still has brought Billy with him, though he's on a much tighter leash than before and he glares at her whenever he sees her on the deck.

"Were you there when Eleanor died?" Woodes Rogers asks, watching her warily.

"I was there when your men killed her," she says, still, hating him with the kind of passion she didn't know she possessed.

His face twists. " _You_ killed her. You and Captain Flint."

Madi snorts. "Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you survive it? She died because of you, and you lost her and a child."

"If you willingly give me the cache, I won't kill your husband," he says.

Madi gives him a sharp look. "Do you think I would trade this whole thing for one man? He is my husband, yes, but unlike you, I know where my priorities are. The voice you hear in your head I imagine I know who it sounds like, as I know Eleanor wanted peace and family and an end to fighting. But I hear other voices. A chorus of voices. Multitudes. They reach back centuries. Men and women and children who'd lost their lives to men like you. Men and women and children forced to wear your chains. I must answer to them and this war their war Flint's war my war it will not be bargained away to avoid a fight, to save John Silver's life or his men's or mine."

Rogers snarls and leaves her, locking the door behind him. 

* * *

One thing she's always had trouble with while sailing, is understanding how much time has passed, so she has no idea what day it is when she hears the sighting of a ship, and she runs to the deck.

" _James_!" She yells, spotting the tell-tale red of his beard. She can see Rogers from the corner of her eye and he grabs her before she has time to react. "Watch out!" she yells again, and the canon misses their ship by mere centimeters, landing in the water behind them.

She can just make out their faces at the sight of her, Silver going pale and sick, Flint, leaning forward urgently over the railing. She can feel the cool kiss of the pistol to her forehead, Woodes Rogers's hand at her throat.

"Gentlemen," he says. "I've come to take what's mine."

She knees him in the groin just as something whizzes in the air, and hits the ship hard, rocking them violently off balance.

The pistol stutters, dragging along her skin, and fires. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a lot of this is based off of research i did about nanny of the maroons, rasta language, and obeah. if any of it seems off, i did a lot of research but i didn't have time to get anyone check for sensitivity (this was a late add to the plot, and i just...did not have the time before it was due to be published, but again, if there are any issues, please let me know. i want to make sure this isn't offensive in any way)
> 
> chap 3 coming very soon, again im so sorry about these delays! my life has been just. stressful these past few months


	3. finales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It ends like it began--with ink on paper.

It takes him awhile, but Jack Rackham makes an entrance. Stage left, with a cannon announcing it. If history were to know Jack Rackham as anything, it would be as someone who makes a presence. 

Madi's body falls to the ground and Woodes Rogers yells to get underway, the commotion of the third ship making it easy for them to disappear into the fog.

" _Madi_ _!_ " Silver yells, leaning so far over the edge he nearly tumbles down into the water, Flint pulling him back. 

"Silver--"

"Shut _up_ ," Silver hisses, eyes wild. "You knew! You knew she was alive this whole time. I saw your face! I heard her yelling to you! You both knew! And now she might really be dead and-and-- _don't fucking touch me."_

Flint lifts his hands into the air and backs away. Silver clenches his fingers around his crutch, his knuckles turning bone-white. 

"I can't--" He swallows, voice rough. "Go see what Rackham wants. I need to be alone."

"Silver..." Flint says again and Silver shakes his head, walking away.

Flint sighs and looks up, Rackham watching from his now-anchored ship, and then glances at the island, measuring. Behind him, Israel Hands watches Silver, waiting for the right moment.

* * *

Silver isn't looking at Flint, Jack notices as they sit in the captain's cabin, discussing plans of action. And Flint isn't quite looking at Silver. No--he's looking at him, just quickly, with a strange expression on his face. If he were anyone else, Jack would think the expression was regret.

"So just to be clear, in the time I've been gone--"

"You mean run with your tail tucked between your legs," Flint says mildly and Jack ignores him.

" _In the time I've been gone_ ," he stresses. "You two have let loose men onto all of Nassau, come to hide the cache again, just to be trapped by Woodes Rogers _again_ as he holds your quartermaster's lovely wife hostage. Again."

Silver lets out a slow exhale, glancing at him.

Jack sighs exasperatedly. "Well, he's going to come back," he says. "So I suggest we prepare for that."

Flint leans forward, and Jack is alarmed at how dead his eyes look. "Let's."

The meeting is long but fruitful, and Jack feels good with their chances. He hadn't been completely honest with them, of course, though now he doesn't think it'll be so hard to get to Captain Flint or Silver, with the way the two of them are fracturing. Max will be pleased with him, he thinks.

"There is something in the air between you and your friend up there. It's just tension between steadfast partners. Or it's something else." Jack tells Silver, as Silver watches Flint, tucked in the shadows. Silver doesn't look at him. Jack leans against the railing of the stairs, looking down at Silver. "We could suffer under the weight of our respective questions. Or would you like to start trading answers?" 

"You have nothing to worry about," Silver says coolly, and Jack watches as he walks away, another red-haired man making his way to Silver too. This man, he thinks, shaking his head. Surrounding himself with them.

* * *

Madi comes to wearing manacles again and she sighs, squinting. Her head throbs, and her shoulder stings. When she glances at it, she can see her sleeve is stained red. A shallow wound or else she'd be hurting a lot more. The door to the cabin opens and she glares at Woodes Rogers when he kneels down to look at her.

"You obviously can't be trusted to roam freely," he says, raising his eyebrows.

"The fact that you even let me in the first place shows a lack of intelligence on your part," she replies bitingly. He just sits back on his heels, watching her carefully.

"What did you hope to accomplish here?"

Madi gives him a measured look. "I accomplished what I needed to on Nassau." There was nothing else she could do on the island besides wait for the rest of her people to come to her and fight. Woodes Rogers, with his head completely focused on Captain Flint and Long John Silver, had given her a freedom to create the myth of herself, to inspire a slow-moving but steadily rising rebellion. She hopes to come back to lead it, but if she can't, it will be there, simmering, until it erupts. It's all she can do.

"And what was that?"

Madi smiles at him sweetly. "If you ever make it back there, which is doubtful, I'm sure you will find out." Rogers abruptly gets up to leave, tired of her. 

"We go back to the Nassau by daybreak," he says to the man guarding her. "Make sure she's on the deck by then. I want to keep an eye on her."

* * *

"Why did you lie to me?" Silver asks, finally breaking the silence between the two of them as they sit in the cabin together, watching the sun set.

Flint looks at him, filthy, exhausted, beaten down, those curls silky with grease. "I had to."

"Why?"

Flint sighs and rubs a hand down his face, smearing dried blood. "Madi and I were worried you wouldn't want to fight anymore, at the sight of her safe. She wanted to do more, had more to give. And I agreed."

Silver curls his fingers into fists.

"She might be dead. You don't seem to care."

"I care," Flint snaps, then softens. "Of course I care. She's my friend. But she's made it clear that if she dies for this, it will be the way she wants to go. And the two of you...you're the best of us. You two would lead Nassau to a greater existence. I believe that."

Silver shakes his head, swallowing convulsively. He can't think about that. He can't think about how Flint never includes himself in these scenarios. "If Woodes Rogers asks for the cache in exchange for her, we're doing it."

"Silver--"

" _No,"_ he snaps. "You owe me this, Captain. You betrayed me--you _both_ did. The number of times I've done what you ask even if it made no sense to me, the number of people I've killed...This you owe to me. If you've ever felt anything for me at all, you will give to to me." He takes another breath in. "After what we've shared--blood, power, a bed...I believe that this is the least you can do for me."

Flint watches him, eyes more grey than green in the dark. "Very well," he says softly. 

* * *

You all know the rest of this story. It was inevitable, wasn't it? Israel Hands whispers into Long John Silver's ear, and Captain Flint takes Dooley with him to bury the cache, a final betrayal. The Walrus, trusty, strong, explodes, and the last of the crew dies, picked off one by one by Billy Bones, (I guess the brother thing was conditional, huh?).

There is a fight--much to Jack's displeasure they chase The Lion, and Flint and Jack corner Woodes Rogers, and Long John Silver frees his wife and love, but not before finding a mirror of himself. But first: a conversation in the midst of a story we all know, a different one that never happened.

("Madi," Silver breathes and he pulls her into his warms, and Madi grips shoulders, the manacles finally off and inhaling his scent, his familiar woodsy scent underneath the grime and soot from the fighting.

"John," she says, the name he barely responded to the first time she called him that, the name he only responds to now when she says it. He cups her face, eyes roving her features hungrily, grief-anger-relief-fear-love warring inside of them.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he asks, not heeding the war happening above them, the boom of guns and the canonfire. The splash of men as they fall into the water. 

"I couldn't," she says. "I love you, John, but you hate this war. These are my people I'm trying to free, and you could never understand that. You know I'm right. But if I had died..."

"Do you think me so like Flint that I'd fight a war in the name of lost love?" he asks, gripping her elbows to keep her standing upright.

"Well, you did, didn't you?" She looks up at him. "You haven't run off yet."

He doesn't tell her of a treaty, or a contract, or a letter tucked in his jacket. He doesn't tell her any of this as his heart breaks and he pulls her close to him again, burying his face in her hair.)

* * *

Madi is more wounded than she'd thought, the bullet that nicked her neck and shoulder not healing correctly, hot with infection, making her sick and feverish. At the end, Woodes Rogers in manacles in Eurydice's brig, Madi in a cabin, Rackham assigns Featherstone the ship, orders him to Maroon Island, and tells him they'll follow him shortly on The Lion but he has to see a man about a chest of gold. Silver presses a kiss to Madi's hot forehead and she grips his hand tightly.

"I love you," she whispers to him and Silver feels sick with dread at what he's about to do to her.

"I love you too," he says to her sleeping form, before leaving the cabin and heading to Rackham's ship.

With Woodes Rogers defeated, Silver turns to Flint and says, "I know you've taken the cache. Show me." And this is the story we know. Flint weaves through the forest like he was born to it, like he has always been a haunt of Skeleton Island, and Silver realizes that Flint was never going to show them where the cache was, that his aim was to get Silver alone. That somehow, just as Silver knows Flint as deeply as if Flint was in his mind, Flint knows him as well.

Silver pulls out a pistol.

Flint’s eyes widen, evergreen and sharp like an emerald, and Silver’s hand shakes as he points the gun at him. 

“Silver,” he says, soft. He looks agonized, his face twitching like ripples of water disturbed by a pebble. “Don’t do this.”

“You don’t get to tell me that,” Silver says, voice cracking down the middle, shattering like fine china. “You don’t get to _look at me like that._ ”

Flint’s hands tremble and Silver sees the corner of his lip turn up, like a snarl. “You’re going to throw it all away? For what?”

“So we can live!” Silver’s voice is half a sob, and his hand shakes harder. “You betrayed me first, _Captain,_ or don’t you remember?”

“We did it so you would fight,” Flint snaps back, hands clenching into fists. “You wouldn’t have done it without something to fight for.” He pauses, eyes dark as ash. “England can't win, Silver. You must know this. You're too smart not to know this. They paint the world full of shadows and then tell their children to stay close to the light. Their light. Their reasons, their judgments. Because in the darkness, there be dragons. But it isn't true. We can prove that it isn't true. In the dark, there is discovery, there is possibility, there is freedom."

“Shut up,” Silver says, “ _Shut up."_

“It’s all good for you,” Flint says. “You have her back.” His breath hitches and Silver wants to close his eyes from the sheer agony on Flint’s face. “You--”

“Thomas is alive,” Silver blurts, then gasps like he’s a drowning man. “Thomas is alive, Flint.”

Flint goes absolutely, deathly still and Silver watches, like they’re suspended in a moment in time--a spider waiting for its prey to fall into its web.

“No,” Flint says roughly, breaking the silence with a twitch of his hand. “I don’t believe you.”

Silver laughs, loud and shaky. “Would you give up your war for him, Captain? Would you give it up for your Thomas? I can take you to him--I can--”

“You don’t get to say his name,” Flint says, abruptly and startlingly angry, his eyes vivid and his teeth bared, the red of his beard as fierce as any flame. “It shouldn’t come out of your mouth.”

Silver goes quiet, his heart a shuddering, fragile thing in his chest, his breath raspy and quick. “For me then,” he says, voice quiet. “Would you give the war up for me?”

Flint-- _James--_ closes his eyes, jaw clenched tight, like he’s in pain. Silver’s palm is sweaty on his crutch, grip slipping off the gun. He doesn’t dare move, his heart scrambling up his throat like a live thing.

“John,” he says, the first time he's said that first name that isn't really his, though it feels more like his than anything else he's worn, and Silver swallows thickly, blinking away the sudden blurriness in his vision. 

“Please,” he says, weak, plaintive. “For all we’ve gone through, for all we’ve done together. This will break you. This will break _me_ ,” and on that his voice shatters like homespun stained glass, like a cathedral gone to ruin. Flint takes one step forward, then another, and another, and Silver drops the pistol onto the ground as Flint reaches up to cup his face, those warm, calloused palms so familiar, so comfortable, even now after everything.

Silver’s tears fall hot on his cheeks, sliding over those hands. “You’ve ruined me,” he says, shivering hard. Flint presses their foreheads together and Silver lets out a sob. “You’ve ruined me, Captain.”

“I’m sorry,” Flint says, voice so very soft, almost a whisper. “John,” he breathes, running a thumb along his cheeks to catch the tears, to wipe them away. 

“I’m not enough,” Silver says, flat but for the way his breath shakes.

“The war--it’s everything--”

“ _T_ _homas_ is the war. Thomas is everything.” There’s a long, shivering silence. “Is there even any room for me?” 

Flint makes a low, ragged noise, something that’s pulled from deep within him, and he kisses Silver, takes that trembling bottom lip between his teeth and soothes it with his tongue. Tastes the salt of the tears Silver’s still crying even as he kisses back, desperate and biting like he thinks it might be his last chance. Silver grips Flint’s shoulders, digs his nails into the fabric of them until he can feel the skin of those muscles. Lets himself be swept away by Flint’s heat, his warm generous mouth and ardent affection, his hands on his face like the sweetest of all communions.

When they break apart, Silver presses his forehead to Flint’s, eyes closed. He can hear Flint breathing, the soft pants of breath against his skin. “I don’t know how to forgive you,” he says, swallowing. “Except to say that I understand. And that I wasn’t lying when I said that Thomas is alive.”

“How long have you known?” Flint asks after a long moment, his hand still curled in Silver’s hair, keeping him close, keeping him still. Silver feels. Grounded. 

“I sent a messenger,” he says, soft. “To a plantation where they send disgraced noble men to work for the rest of their years.” He shifts back, just slightly, so he can pull out a worn letter. “Proof.”

Flint keeps one hand in Silver’s hair but uses the other to open the note. His breath catches sharply, face doing that movement it always does when Hamilton is mentioned--a shiver that starts in the cracking-glass emerald of his eyes and spreads throughout the rest of his face, the shattering of a mirror.

“It’s his writing,” Flint says, an awed note in his voice. Silver watches as the last of the glass falls from his face, and his eyes shut in grief, his hand closing around the gun again. He has won--so why does it feel like such a loss?

* * *

“John Silver isn’t here,” Woodes Rogers says, and Jack is pleased to note that he won’t even look at him. Good.

“Should he be?” Julius asks coolly. “You’re making the treaty with us. And with Nassau. You leave us alone and go back to the place you came from.” The queen stands next to him, resolute.

“Mr. Silver may have hurried us onto this path, but it was one he did so with my blessing,” she says.

Woodes Rogers, fresh from his defeat at the hands of both Rackham and Flint, glares at all of them, his wrists in chains. Around them, the camp bustles, people moving on with their lives. Madi had refused to be a part of it, and Silver had followed her, which was just as well. The stink of his grief from whatever happened with Captain Flint had been unbearable. Jack had had to watch them on the slow trip to Savannah, Captain Flint in chains because Jack wasn't a fool, and Silver walking like a living, breathing wound every time he so much as looked at him. Silver had disappeared at one point, into the brig where Captain Flint was, and he'd come out with red eyes. Jack hadn't asked.

(The conversation went something like this. Flint, wrists bruised and scratched, watching Silver silently.

Silver, all talk wiped clean from his body, staring back. "I want to give you something," he'd said and Flint hadn't reacted. Silver had taken a breath. "I want to give you my past." And he'd told Flint everything.)

Jack is well aware of the absence Captain Flint creates, how formidable Madi and Captain Flint would have been united against this. 

Thank god, Jack thinks with no small amount of irony. For Long John Silver.

* * *

It ends with ink on page, with Rackham, the queen, Julius, and Woodes Rogers signing a page that John Silver had drafted with the queen and Julius’s help. He wasn’t there, but it doesn’t matter, does it? The war ends, people leave. Woodes Rogers is taken away, back to England, destitute, reputation ruined.

Madi is stony-faced when she sees Silver make his way towards her.

“You took this from us,” she says, voice low.

Silver watches her, his chest aching with a mix of grief, love, of bone-deep betrayal.

“You both lied to me, for so long. And yet, I can’t help but want you both to live. So I did this.”

Madi snorts. “What you did to James you had planned long before you realized I was alive. You were going to betray us before you ever found out our own betrayal.”

Silver winces. “Perhaps,” he says softly. “But I wanted him to live. Is that a crime? He was the last person I had left, and he was on his way out. Every talk of the future was one without him in it. Me, leading the men. Me, dealing with a freed Nassau. Me, me, me. I had no right to take this war from you,” Silver agrees. “But I wasn’t alone in feeling it was a war without end.”

“If you think this treaty ends it, you are mistaken,” Madi says coldly.

“I know it doesn’t,” Silver huffs. “But at least you’re alive. And I’ll wait days, months, years--forever, for you to understand why I’ve done what I’ve done.”

Madi shakes her head. “I love you, John,” she says. “But I built something in Nassau that didn’t deserve to end. So you may wait. But I can’t promise I’ll come back to you.”

She passes him and Silver watches her go, chest aching.

* * *

It ended on paper, but it never really ends, does it? Madi’s name lived on, circling Nassau. Long John Silver might have been a ghost story, but Madi of the Maroons was a movement, a call to arms, an underground revolution. Her name lingered, and those who knew, _knew_ , and Max, from her perch overlooking all of Nassau Island, heard it too, and could see the path that history would take. She knew she’d be on the winning side when it happened.

And thousands of miles away, on a small farm in southern Florida where two men lived and the sea still touched the air, a man with red hair streaked with grey opened the front door to a one-legged man whose name lingered in his dreams and nightmares, a hopeful expression on his face. And in this man’s hand was a letter.

 _James,_ the letter said, in looping handwriting, a familiar beaded bracelet tucked in the envelope. _I hope this letter finds you well. I'm ready to try again. Are you?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guys i forgot israel hands existed i thought i was done and i had to go back and add him in. i'm. wow. ok.
> 
> I'M DONE! FINALLY! would love to hear y'all's thoughts on this, and thank u again for your patience as i got my life together to finally complete this.


End file.
